


A Lover Preserved

by the_lady1823



Category: Original Work
Genre: 1920s, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Inspired by Brideshead Revisited, Inspired by Rebecca, Inspired by The Great Gatsby, Jazz Age, and also virginia woolf, and daphne du maurier, and evelyn waugh, basically a copy of every early 20th century British author, come at me f scott fitzgerald, i wrote this because jazz is cool
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 03:34:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29325588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_lady1823/pseuds/the_lady1823
Summary: aight fellas sorry for the long break. anyway here's a short story involving jazz and parties in spirit of The Great Gatsby being released into the public domain.
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Male Character





	A Lover Preserved

**Author's Note:**

> aight fellas sorry for the long break. anyway here's a short story involving jazz and parties in spirit of The Great Gatsby being released into the public domain.

“Look here, isn’t this silk slip so lovely…” 

I looked to my side, searching for his polished shoes and tall figure poking out from the swarming crowds of the department store. The shoppers continued, bags slung about the elbow, women in crepe day dresses trying on hats over their Marcel waves. He wasn’t anywhere. I expected a voice to call out “Ah, Ottoline my dear, I had lost you, let’s not wander astray again.” I stood by waiting. He said nothing. He was not here. I was by myself. I had been by myself the entire time.

Alone, I was alone. Singular. Individual. Independent- the wrong independence, an unrelenting listlessness, drifting insensitively through the waking world. Alone, even with the congested traffic, millions of souls traversing that asphalt territory, a transitional period, simply passing from one point to another. Motorcars, the innovation of this century. As a child, I never dreamed that I could fly across London at forty miles per hour.

I wish that it stayed a mere dream.

Night abrogates the restraints of the day. Shoulders and arms bared, rouge and powder on the face, free to drink and smoke and dance through the streets. Syncopated rhythms resounded from clubs with scintillant lights and patrons. Lines of them, in fuchsia velvet and clattering bangles, sharp suits, the colours amalgamating, kicking and gyrating, wailing in ecstasy. I kicked and shimmied and spun, passing myriad unfamiliar visages, hoping to espy the one familiar to me. Arms outstretched, spinning faster, vision reduced to a blur, into the conglomeration of dancers. I stumbled, faint and unaware, then a pool of red issued onto the floor.

Bedridden, invalided, a fraction of my previous self. My head lolled as Mrs Horton dabbed the bloodstains from my face. “He wasn’t there to catch you?” she remarked. No, he wasn’t there. I believed him to be there. But I knew better. I knew exactly where he went. I knew Mrs Horton’s plates of toast and bacon for him lay untouched, and so were the letters delivered to him, shoved into a drawer, the seals unbroken. Alone, left wholly alone, swathed in fine linens, staring at the canopy of my bed.

Thunder. It flashed, imbuing a ghastly silver hue in the room. A succession of heavy rain followed; its drops pelted at the windowpane.

Like the sound of gravel crunching under a moving wheel.

The curtains billowed, diaphanous white lily petals swaying, the folds undulating with the howling zephyr, ‘wuthering,’ as Northerners say, where ‘Wuthering Heights’ comes from. The wuthering stopped, it had tired itself out, no longer weeping and lachrymal. I could be dead or alive, in the midst of a nightmare, perhaps when I arise it shall be light and warm. Yonder, the telephone rang, shrill, the metallic oscillation invading my senses.

So it was a nightmare.

I got up, bare feet against the cold wooden floor, convulsed by shivers. The ringing persisted, impatient and raucous, begging to be answered. I fumbled for the receiver. Nobody spoke.

“Hello?”

“Mr Sidney Elliot’s bill for Netherby & Co. is overdue---”

I hung up. A sound lingered upstairs, an old show-tune. It came from the gramophone in his room- his unused room.

“…If you were the only girl in the world  
and I were the only boy  
Nothing else would matter in the world today  
We could go on loving in the same old way…”

That _was_ his favourite song.

The vault above was shrouded by ashen clouds, a bleak backdrop for the looming manor, its spires shooting upwards, the windows possessing a malignant glint. Once it had been brilliantly lighted, filled with the chatter of hundreds of people, the epicentre of opulence and glamour. Once I had been here, been here with him. There, on that drive littered with cars bearing intoxicated young things. He was one of them, foolish, impetuous, jerking the steering wheel from one extreme to another. I knew what would come next. I burst from the front door, sprinting to the driveway, screaming at him to stop. He did not hear me. He swerved, a horrible screeching sound pierced my ears, before colliding with two other cars. There I was, kneeling at his mangled body streaked with incarnadine blood. He was gone. Gone forever from the mortal plane by my folly.

His name was inscribed on the elm tree; “SIDNEY MAURICE ELLIOT, 1893-1921.” A lover preserved, letters carved onto a tree trunk, a realisation of my naïve romantic sensibilities. I placed a bundle of three sprigs in the hollow beneath the inscription. Three sprigs for three years.


End file.
